'She went about committing suicide quite coldbloodedly, from all that I have been able to find out. If there were textbooks for aspiring suicides, her own might be included as an example to emulate. She went down to the Western Auto store here in town - the same one where I got my first bicycle many many years ago - and bought twenty feet of rubber hose. She fitted one end over Christine's exhaust pipe and put the other end in one of the back windows. She had never gotten a driver's licence, but she knew how to start the car. That was really all she needed to know.'
I pursed my lips, wet them with my tongue, and heard my voice, little more than a rusty croak. 'I think I'll get that soda now.'
'Perhaps you'd be good enough to get me another,' he said. 'It will keep me awake - they always do - but I suspect I'd be awake most of tonight anyway.'
I suspected I would be, too. I went to get the sodas in the motel office, and on my way back I stopped halfway across the parking lot. He was only a deeper shadow in front of his motel unit, his white socks glimmering like small ghosts. I thought, Maybe the car is cursed. Maybe that's what it is. It sounds like a ghost story, all right. There's a signpost up ahead . . . next stop, the Twilight Zone!
But that was ridiculous, wasn't it?
Of course it was. I went on walking again Cars didn't carry curses any more than people carried them; that was horror-movie stuff, sort of amusing for a Saturday night at the drive-in, but very, very far from the day-to-day facts that make up reality.
I gave him his can of soda and heard the rest of his story, which could be summed up in one line: He lived unhappily ever after. The one and only Roland D. LeBay had kept his small tract house, and he had kept his 1958 Plymouth. In 1965 he had hung up his night watchman's cap and his check-in clock. And somewhere around that same time he had stopped his painstaking efforts to keep Christine looking and running like new - he had let her run down the way a man might let a watch run down.
'You mean it just sat but there?' I asked. 'Since 1965? For thirteen years?'
'No, he put it in the garage, of course,' LeBay said. 'The neighbours would never have stood for a car just mouldering away out on someone's lawn. In the country, maybe, but not in Suburbia, USA.'
'But it was out there when we - '
'Yes, I know. He put it out on the lawn with a FOR SALE sign in the window. I asked about that. I was curious, and so I asked. At the Legion. Most of them had lost touch with Rollie, but one of them said he thought he'd seen the car out there on the lawn for the first time this May.'
I started to say something and then fell silent. A terrible idea had come to me, and that idea was simply this: It was too convenient. Much too convenient. Christine had sat in that dark garage for years - four, eight, a dozen, more. Then - a few months before Arnie and I came alone and Arnie saw it - Roland LeBay had suddenly hauled it out and stuck a FOR SALE sign on it.
Later on - much later - I checked back through issues of the Pittsburgh papers and the Libertyville paper, the Keystone. He had never advertised the Fury, at least not in the papers, where you usually hawk a car you want to sell. He just put it out on his suburan street - not even a thoroughfore - and waited for a buyer to come along.
I did not completely realize the rest of the thought then - not in any logical, intellectual way, at least - but I had enough of it to feel a recurrence of that cold, blue feeling of fright. It was as if he knew a buyer would be coming. If not in May, then in June. Or July. Or August. Sometime soon.
No, I didn't get this idea logically or rationally. What came instead was a wholly visceral image: a Venus-Flytrap at the edge of a swamp, its green jaws wide open, waiting for an insect to land.